Paximathia
Bread baked once as a loaf and a second time as slices, until it is hard enough to keep for months.
Vegan.
Ingredients
- 500 g barley flour
- 300 g wholemeal flour
- 200 g strong white flour
- 10 g fast-action yeast
- 100 ml olive oil
- 600 ml warm water
- 15 g salt
- 1 teaspoon sugar
Method
- IT IS BAKED TWICE AND THE SECOND BAKE IS LONG AND COOL. The first makes bread; the second, three hours at 120C, drives out nearly all the remaining water and is what lets a rusk sit in a cupboard for six months. Cut short, the slices are merely dry: they go soft again within a week and mould by the second.
- AND THE LOAF IS CUT WHILE IT IS WARM, NOT COLD. Barley bread cold is already too hard to cut cleanly and shatters under the knife. Warm, a bread knife goes through it; the pieces then dry in their own shape.
- The three flours, yeast, salt and sugar mixed dry.
- Oil and warm water worked in, then kneaded 12 minutes. Barley flour has little gluten so this will never feel like a white dough -- it stays dense and slightly crumbly, and that is correct.
- Risen 2 hours, covered. It will not double; half as much again is what to expect.
- Shaped into two long loaves on a lined tray and risen 1 hour more.
- Baked at 200C for 35 minutes until firm and hollow to a tap underneath.
- LEFT 20 MINUTES ONLY, then cut across into slices 2 cm thick while still warm. Not sawed -- pressed through with a serrated knife in one stroke.
- The slices laid flat on racks over trays with air round every side, cut faces up.
- Back into the oven at 120C for 3 hours. The oven door wedged open a crack with a wooden spoon for the last hour, so the moisture leaves rather than circulating.
- They are done when one snapped in half shows no give at all and no damp line through the middle.
- Cooled completely on the rack and stored in a cloth bag or a tin, never airtight plastic. They keep six months.
- To eat: briefly dampened under a tap, or left to take up the juice of something wet, as on the dakos page.
Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.
Filed under Greece · All recipes